The Internationale

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky

Bob Dylan

Today is the World Day for Safety and Health at Work and the latest edition of my ebook entitled How Grim Was My Valley – The Great Safety Charade is available as a free download. It also includes hyperlinks to many other supplementary articles.

After more than five decades of rampant free market fundamentalism exacerbated by the merger of state and corporate interests it exposes how corporate brigands have been provided with a malevolent freedom to harm amidst a neoliberal maelstrom.

It provides numerous examples of workplace disasters and industrial diseases and highlights many of the interrelated exogenous and endogenous risks, which significantly contribute towards Australia’s deplorable occupational health and safety performance. These include:

· Zero harm ideology

· Infallibility and the pursuit of perfection and escalating psychosocial risks

· McJob gig economy, uberisation and exploitation of migrant workers

· Coercive franchising arrangements

· Regulatory and policy capture and railroading harmonisation of safety legislation

· Reluctant ratification of ILO conventions

· Industrial manslaughter

· Obfuscation of duty of care and removal of reverse onus of proof

· Laissez faire economics and the race to the bottom

· Incongruity of shareholder theory with health and safety legislation

· Lucrative performance bonuses linked to productivity and safety performance

· Corporations law and the corporate veil

· Job Active Program Work for the Dole

· Seasonal Worker Program and Pacific Labour Mobility Scheme

· Asymmetrical work health and safety curriculum

· JAS-ANZ auditing scheme

It offers an alternative ecoliterate transdisciplinary approach, which focuses on the existential dialectic between the objective and subjective elements of risk.